Farmworkers call - new grape boycott
1985Sophie Mastor 1985-08Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 16 →
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LOS ANGELES-On June 24 over 300 people, including members of a wide variety of labor unions, demonstrated here with the United Farm Workers Union (UFW). The picket line was called to help kick off a new nationwide boycott of table grapes.
I spoke with UFW President Cesar Chavez on the picket line. He told me that only 3 percent of the grapes grown in California are harvested under UFW contracts. This represents a dramatic decline since Gov. George Deukmejian took office in 1983.
Wealthy growers in the Central Valley and Northern California have been assured by the governor's office that they can effectively ignore the state farm-labor laws that were enacted after long years of struggle by the UFW.
Chavez reported that the workers, most of whom are Latino, are now subject to classic union-busting tactics such as the firing of workers who are elected to office by the UFW membership.
At the same time, wages and working conditions are rapidly declining. Chavez worked in the fields with his family as a child and a young man. He remembers vividly what the conditions that necessitated the struggle for a farm union were like—the endless days of back-breaking toil, the lack of decent housing and sanitation, and the brutality of hired foremen.
Over 17 million adult Americans boycotted table grapes in the 1970s. As the growers persist in violation of the law, Chavez emphasized, it is time for another boycott.
Grapes picked under a UFW contract have a black eagle stamped on the packing crates. If you don't see the UFW logo, don't buy the grapes. dadd